Book Recommendations from Nassim Taleb

(May 2015) Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure (5 stars)

A gem: how to go from the abstract to the abstract in a playful way. There is no book like it.

This book takes us through the formulation of the theorems in On Landau damping by Clment Mouhot and Cdric
Villani. Villani is playful in real life, his research is playful, and the book is playful.

This is a gem for a singular reason. One sees exactly how Villani (or a pure mathematician) goes from abstract to
abstract without ever exiting the world of pure and symbolic mathematics, even though the subject concerns a very
concrete real-world topic. I kept waiting for him to use simulations or even plots to see how the equations worked. But
he did not he and Mouhot had recourse to outside help (a student or an assistant) for the graphs and he camly noted
that they looked great. Later in the book he relied on others to do the numerical work as an afterthought. Most
physicists, quants, and applied mathematicians would have played with a computer to get the intuition; Villani just
worked with mathematical objects, abstract mathematical objects, and very abstract at that. And this is a big deal for the
subject because it belongs to a certain class of problems that do not have analytic solutions, usually requiring numerical
approaches.

Landau damping is about something many people are indirectly familiar with. Some history: FokkerPlanck equation,
itself the Kolmogorov forward equation, is used commonly as the law of motion of particles (hence diffusions in
finance). We quants use it in the main partial stochastic differential equation. In plasma physics it is related to the
Boltzman equation, which, by using mean-interraction in place of every interration (mean-field), leads to the Vlasov
equation. Landau damping is (sort of) about how things dont blow up because of some exponential decay. Proving it
outside the linear version remained elusive. Villani and Mouhot set to prove it. They eventually do.
One note. I read it in the English translation (because I was in a hurry to get the book), but noticed an oddity that may
confuse the reader. Calcul in French does not mean calculation (in the sense of numerical calculation) but
derivation, so the reader might be confused about calculations thinking they were numerical when Villani stayed at
the abstract/symbolic level.

I would have read the book in one sitting. It grips you like a detective novel.

PS- Some UK BS operator, the type of journalist with an attempt at some PhD in something related to physics who
thinks he knows it all and is the representative of the general public trashed the book in the Spectator. Ignore him: the
fellow is clueless. Look at reviews by PRACTICING quants and mathematicians. I do not think there is another book
like this one.

(November 2014) Modern Aramaic-English/English-Modern Aramaic Dictionary & Phrasebook: Assyrian/Syriac (5

Stars)

There is no way we Levantines can learn the language of our ancestors in an organic way except via nerds insisting on
1) grammar, 2) writing in one of the unwieldy Syriac scripts that one cannot even read on a computer screen without
dowloading strange fonts. But Aramaic is still spoken, let us take advantage of it, and figure out how to say I want to
eat mjaddara rather than memorize poetry by some dead author. Aramaic isnt a dead language and it is the shame
Levantines study Arabic instead of our own heritage.

This book in the Latin alphabet makes both Swadaya and Turoyo alive and easy to read, with all manner of real-world
expressions. One can use it to supplement scholarly studies, or just to figure out how modern people speak our ancient
language. There are Arabic influences, but the distance between the spoken language and, say, Bar Hebraeus is quite
narrow.
I would suggest the authors expand the dictionary. It would be the only one in the latin script.

Most excellent, except for very few and small mistakes. Debo in Turoyo is not wolf, but bear.

(April 2014) The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (5 Stars)

The point that top-down development methods are great on paper but have not produced benefits (so far) is a point
Easterly has made before, heavily influencing yours truly in the formation his own argument against naive
interventionism and the collection of humanitarians fulfilling their personal growth and shielding themselves from
their conscience This is more powerful: the West has been putting development ahead of moral issues, patronizingly
setting aside the right of the people to decide their own fate, including whether they want these improvements, hence
compounding failure and turning much of development into an agenda that benefits the careers (and angst) of
humanitarians, imperial policies, and, not least, local autocrats *without* any moral contribution. Talking about a
sucker problem.

***

To put it in an aphorism, they didnt ask the people if they would rather get respect and no aid rather than aid and no
respect.

(Jan 2014) Modelling Extremal Events: for Insurance and Finance (Stochastic Modelling and Applied Probability) (5
stars Indispensable)

The mathematics of extreme events, or the remote parts of the probability distributions, is a discipline on its own, more
important than any other with respect to risk and decisions since some domains are dominated by the extremes: for the
class of subexponential (and of course for the subclass of power laws) the tails ARE the story.

Now this book is the bible for the field. It has been diligently updated. It is complete, in the sense that there is nothing
of relevance that is not mentioned, treated, or referred to in the text. My business is hidden risk which starts where this
book stops, and I need the most complete text for that.

In spite of the momentous importance of the field, there is a very small number of mathematicians who deal with tail
events; of these there is a smaller group who go both inside and outside the Cramer conditions (intuitively, thin-tailed
or exponential decline).

It is also a book that grows on you. I would have given it a 5 stars when I started using it; today I give it 6 stars, and
certainly 7 next year.

I am buying a second copy for the office. If I had to go on a desert island with 2 probability books, I would take Fellers
two volumes (written >40 years ago) and this one.

One housecleaning detail: buy the hardcover, not the paperback as the ink quality is weaker for the latter.

(Dec 1/2013) The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion: Theory and Practice (5 Stars)

There are two methods to consider in a risky strategy.

1) The first is to know all parameters about the future and engage in optimized portfolio construction, a lunacy unless
one has a god-like knowledge of the future. Let us call it Markowitz-style. In order to implement a full Markowitz- style
optimization, one needs to know the entire joint probability distribution of all assets for the entire future, plus the exact
utility function for wealth at all future times. And without errors! (I have shown that estimation errors make the system
explode.)

2) Kellys method (or, rather, Kelly-Thorpe), developed around the same period, which requires no joint distribution or
utility function. It is very robust. In practice one needs to estimate the ratio of expected profit to worst- case return
dynamically adjusted to avoid ruin. In the case of barbell transformations, the worst case is guaranteed (leave 80% or so
of your money in reserves). And model error is much, much milder under Kelly criterion. So, assuming one has the
edge (as a sole central piece of information), engage in a dynamic strategy of variable betting, getting more
conservative after losses (cut your losses) and more aggressive with the houses money. The entire focus is the
avoidance of gamblers ruin.

The first strategy was only embraced by academic financial economists empty suits without skin in the game
because you can make an academic career writing BS papers with method 1 much better than with method 2. On the
other hand EVERY SURVIVING speculator uses explicitly or implicitly method 2 (evidence: Ray Dalio, Paul Tudor
Jones, Renaissance, even Goldman Sachs!) For the first method, think of LTCM and the banking failure.
Let me repeat. Method 2 is much, much, much more scientific in the true sense of the word, that is rigorous and
applicable. Method 1 is good for job market papers . Now this book presents all the major papers for the second line
of thinking. It is almost exhaustive; many great thinkers in Information theory and probability (Ed Thorpe, Leo
Breiman, T M Cover, Bill Ziemba) are represented even the original paper by Bernouilli.

Buy 2 copies, just in case you lose one. This book has more meat than any other book in decision theory, economics,
finance, etc

(Sept 5/2013) A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes (5 Stars)

We Sherlock Holmes fans, readers, and secret imitators need a map. Here it is. Peter Bevelin is one of the wisest people
on the planet. He went through the books and pulled out sections from Conan Doyles stories that are relevant to us
moderns, a guide to both wisdom and Sherlock Holmes. It makes you both wiser and eager to reread Sherlock Holmes.

(Ed. I posted on Peters Book)

(Aug 31/2013) The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal (5 Stars)

Indispensable. As a practitioner of probability, Ive read many book on the subject. More are linear combinations of
other books and ideas rehashed without real understanding that the idea of probability harks back the Greek pisteuo
(credibility) and pervaded classical thought. Almost all of these writers made the mistake to think that the ancients were
not into probability. And most books such Against the Gods are not even wrong about the notion of probability: odds
on coin flips are a mere footnote. If the ancients were not into computable probabilities, it was not because of theology,
but because they were not into games. They dealt with complex decisions, not merely probability. And they were very
sophisticated at it.

This book stands above, way above the rest: Ive never seen a deeper exposition of the subject, as this text covers, in
addition to the mathematical bases, the true philosophical origin of the notion of probability. In addition Franklin covers
matters related to ethics and contract law, such as the works of the medieval thinker Pierre de Jean Olivi, that very few
people discuss today.

Probability, Random Variables and Stochastic Processes (5 Stars)

When readers and students ask to me for a useable book for nonmathematicians to get into probability (or a probabilistic
approach to statistics), before embarking into deeper problems, I suggest this book by the Late A. Papoulis. I even
recommend it to mathematicians as their training often tends to make them spend too much time on limit theorems and
very little on the actual plumbing.

The treatment has no measure theory, cuts to the chase, and can be used as a desk reference. If you want measure
theory, go spend some time reading Billingsley. A deep understanding of measure theory is not necessary for scientific
and engineering applications; it is not necessary for those who do not want to work on theorems and technical proofs.

Ive notice a few complaints in the comments section by people who felt frustrated by the treatment: do not pay
attention to them. Ignore them. It the subject itself that is difficult, not this book. The book, in fact, is admirable and
comprehensive given the current state of the art.

I am using this book as a benchmark while writing my own, but more advanced, textbook (on errors in use of statistical
models). Anything derived and presented in Papoulis, I can skip. And when students ask me what they need as pre-
requisite to attend my class or read my book, my answer is: Papoulis if you are a scientist, Varadhan if you are more
abstract.

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning (5 Stars)

There is something admirable about the school of the Russians: they are thinkers doing math, with remarkable clarity,
minimal formalism, and total absence of unnecessary pedantry one finds in more modern texts (in the post Bourbaki
era). This is of course surprising as one would have expected the exact opposite from the products of the communist
era. Mathematicians should be using this book as a model for their own composition. You can read it and reread it.
Professors should assign this in addition to modern texts, as readers can get intutions, something alas absent from
modern texts.

Probability Theory (Courant Lecture Notes) (5 Stars)

I know which books I value when I end up buying a second copy after losing the first one. This book gives a complete
overview of the basis of probability theory with some grounding in measure theory, and presents the main proofs. It is
remarkable because of its concision and completeness: visibly prof Varadhan lectured from these notes and kept
improving on them until we got this gem. There is not a single sentence too many, yet nothing is missing.

For those who dont know who he is, Varadhan stands as one of the greatest probabilists of all time. Learning
probability from him is like learning from Aristotle.

Varadhan has two other similar volumes one covering stochastic processes the other into the theory of large deviations
(though older than this current text). The book on Stochastic Processes should be paired with this one.

Models.Behaving.Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life (5
Stars)

Here is what I wrote in my endorsement: Emanuel Derman has written my kind of a book, an elegant combination of
memoir, confession, and essay on ethics, philosophy of science and professional practice. He convincingly establishes
the difference between model and theory and shows why attempts to model financial markets can never be genuinely
scientific. It vindicates those of us who hold that financial modeling is neither practical nor scientific. Exceedingly
readable.

From the remarks here, people seem to be blaming Derman for not having written the type of books they usually read
They are blaming him for being original! This is very philistinic. This book is a personal essay; if you dont like it,
dont read it, there is no need to blame the author for not delivering your regular science reporting. Why dont you go
blame Montaigne for discussing his personal habits in the middle of a meditation on war inspired by Plutarch?

Body by Science: A Research Based Program to Get the Results You Want in 12 Minutes a Week (5 Stars)

I feel guilty for not having posted a review earlier: I owe a lot to this book. I figured out the value of intensity training
and maximizing recovery. I use the ideas but with minor modifications (my own personal workout is entirely based on
free weights and barbells, but I incur and accept a risk of injury). I have been applying the ideas for more than three
years. Just get over the inhibitions (and illusions of control) and accept the idea of training less.
Gratitude.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust (5 Stars)

I read this book after completing my exposition of overcompensation, how a stressor or a random event causes an
increase in strength, in excess of what is needed, like a redundancy. I was also looking for evidence of convex reaction
to stressor, or the effect of a mathematical property called Jensens inequality in domains and found it exposed here (in
other words, why a combination low dose (most of the time) and high dose (rarely) beats medium dose all the time. The
authors presents the evidence for the phenomenon in the following: 1) acute stressors cum recovery beat both absence
of stressors and chronic ones; 2) stressors make one stronger (post traumatic growth); 3) risk management is mediated
by the deep structures in us, not rational decision-making; 4) winning causes an increase in strength (the latter are more
complicated effects of convexity/Jensens Inequality).

Great book. I ignored the connection to financial markets while reading it. But I learned that when under stress, one
should seek the familiar. Bravo!

The Opposing Shore (5 Stars)

Until I read this book, Buzzatis Il deserto dei tartari was my favorite novel, perhaps my only novel, the only one I
cared to keep re-reading through life. This is, remarkably a very similar story about the antichamber of anticipation
(rather than the antichamber of hope as I called Buzzatis book), but written in a much finer language, by a real writer
(Buzzati was a journalist, which made his prose more functional) ; the style is lapidary with remarkable precision; it has
texture, wealth of details, and creates a mesmerizing athmosphere. Once you enter it, you are stuck there. I kept telling
myself while reading it: this is the book. It suddenly replaced the deserto.

A few caveats/comments. First, I read it in the original French Le Rivage des Syrtes (French Edition), not in this
English translation, but I doubt that the translator can mess up such a fine style and the imagery. Second, the blurb says
Gracq received the Goncourt prize for it. Julien Gracq REFUSED the Goncourt, he despised the Parisian literary circles
and by 1951 decided to stay in the margin. He stuck to his publisher Jos Corti rather than switch to the fancy Gallimard
after his success (as Proust did) (or other publishing houses for the fakes and the selfpromoters). Third, this book came
out a few years after Buzzatis deserto, but before Buzzati was translated into French. I wonder if Gracq had heard of
the deserto; the coincidence is too strong to be ignored.

Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself (5 Stars)

I dont have time for a full review for now; all I have to say is that we have the account of a person who says it the way
it was, revealing the types of truths that dont fit the New York Times and others pawns. When history is written, this
will be used, not the spin by the bankers slaves and soldiers (Geithner, Rubin et al.) Bravo Sheila!

Information: The New Language of Science (5 stars)

If you want an introduction to information theory, and, in a way, probability theory from the real front door, this is it. A
clearly written book, very intuitive, explains things, such as the Monty Hall problem in a few lines. I will make it a
prerequisite before more technical great books, such as Cover and Thompson.

Free The Animal: Lose Weight & Fat With The Paleo Diet (5 stars)

A charming primer on the paleo idea, with an illustration through the authors own life. I read it in one sitting.

Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (5 stars)

This is a great synthesis of the modularity approach to cognitive science. It covers the entire field and has the right
footnotes for the patches.

The style is readable, & the author has an attitude (with is a very good thing, but his jokes are often bland, not
aggressive enough). While I strongly disagree with his treatment of morality (I am deontic), I can safely say, so far, that
this is not just one of the best books in cognitive science, but certainly one of the most readable.

Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (5 stars)

I read this book twice. The first time, I thought that it was excellent, the best compendium of ideas of social science by
arguably the best thinker in the field. I took copious notes, etc. I agreed with its patchwork-style approach to rational
decision making. I knew that it had huge insights applicable to my refusal of general theories [they dont work], rather
limit ourselves to nuts and bolts [they work].

Then I started reading it again, as the book tends to locate itself by my bedside and sneaks itself in my suitcase when I
go on a trip. It is as if the book wanted me to read it. It is what literature does to you when it is at its best. So I realized
why: it had another layer of depth and the author distilled ideas from the works of Proust, La Rochefoucault,
Tocqueville, Montaigne, people with the kind of insights that extend beyond the ideas, and that makes you feel that a
reductionist academic treatment of the subject will necessary distort it [& somehow Elster managed to combine
Montaigne and Kahneman-Tversky]. So as an anti-Platonist I finally found a rigorous treatment of human nature that is
not Platonistic not academic (in the bad sense of the word).

The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War (5 stars)

This book has wonderful qualities that I am certain will be picked up by other reviewers. But I would like to add the
following. This is the most profound examination of how nationality is enforced on a group of people, with the internal
colonization process and the stamping out of idiosyncratic traits. As someone suspicious of government and state
control, I was wondering how France did so well in spite of having a big government. This book gave me the answer: it
took a long time for the government and the nation to penetrate the depth of deep France, la France profonde. It was
not until recently that French was spoken by the majority of the citizens. Schools taught French but it was just like
Greek or Latin: people forgot it right after they finished their (short) school life. For a long time Frances villages were
unreachable.

A great book, a great investigation.

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (5 stars)

Gary Taubes is a true empiricist. I cant believe people hold on to the Platonicity of the thermodynamic theory of diet
(calorie in = calorie out).

Read it twice, once for the diet, once a a rich document in the history of science.

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes (4 stars)

I read Plato and the Platypus by Umberto Eco, which I found brilliant and was sucked into buying this book thinking it
was about the same problem of categories. But Philosophy this is not, or if it is, it is not deep enough to give
satisfaction. This is like a brief drink in an airplane lounge with someone funny, smart, witty, but not too funny. So I
would give it my lowest rating: 4 stars (as an author I cant give below that I just would not review).

Would I buy it again? Perhaps, but only for a plane ride. It left me very very hungry for both jokes and philosophy.

Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger, 3rd Edition (5 Stars)

A wonderful book on wisdom and decision-making written by a wise decision-maker. This is the kind of book you read
first, then leave by your bedside and re-read a bit every day, so you can slowly soak up the wisdom. It is sort of
Montaigne but applied to business, with a great investigation of the psychological dimension of decision-making.

I like the book for many reasons the main one is that it was written by a practitioner who knows what he wants, not by
an academic.

Enjoy it.

The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (5 stars)

I initially bought this book as I was curious about the differences between Eastern & Western traditions, particularly
with the notion of theosis the deification of man. This book goes far deeper, and covers pre-Christian practices (like
Stoic thoughts, the deifications of Kings, Roman Emperors, that of private citizens who committed symbolic acts such
as Antinous, Hadrians obsession, who drowned to save mankind and other sotirologies).

The book was initially Russells doctoral thesis, which, as far as I can guess from the dates, had to have been completed
when he was in late middle age. But he made it very readable, free of the theophilosophical jargon of similar texts. He
still has quotes in the original language and it is a true piece of scholarship.

Statistical Models: Theory and Practice (5 stars)

I spent my life focusing on the errors of statistics and how they sometimes fail us in real life, because of the
misinterpretation of what the techniques can do for you. This book is outstanding in the following two aspects: 1) It is
of immense clarity, embedding everything in real situations, 2) It uses the real-life situation to critique the statistical
model and show you the limit of statistic. For instance, he shows a few anecdotes here and there to illustrate how
correlation between two variables might not mean anything causal, or how asymptotic properties may not be relevant in
real life.

This is the first statistics book Ive seen that cares about presenting statistics as a tool to GET TO THE TRUTH.
Please buy it.
Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs (5 stars)

The Birth Stochastic Science: Rewriting the History of Medicine

Controlled experiment can easily show absence of design in medical research: you compare the results of top-down
directed research to randomly generated discoveries. Well, the U.S. government provides us with the perfect experiment
for that: the National Cancer Institute that came out of the Nixon war on cancer in the early 1970s.

Despite the Herculean effort and enormous expense, only a few drugs for the treatment of cancer were found through
NCIs centrally directed, targeted program. Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant extracts,
representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer drug reached approved status. This failure stands
in stark contrast to the discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the Vinca Alcaloids -
a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed research.

From Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs, by Morton Meyers, a book that just came out.
It is a MUST read. Please go buy it. Read it twice, not once. Although the author does not take my drastic stochastic
tinkering approach, he provides all kind of empirical evidence for the role of design. He does not directly discuss the
narrative fallacy(q.v.) and the retrospective distortion (q.v.) but he certainly allows us to rewrite the history of medicine.

We did not realize that cures for cancer had been coming from other brands of research. You search for noncancer drugs
and find something you were not looking for (and vice versa). But the interesting constant:
a- The discoverer is almost always treated like an idiot by his colleagues. Meyers describes the vicious side effect of
peer reviewing.
b- Often people see the result but cannot connect the dots (researchers are autistic in their own way).
c- The members of the guild gives the researcher a hard time for not coming from their union. Pasteur was a chemist not
a doctor/biologist. The establishment kept asking him where is your M.D., monsieur. Luckily Pasteur had too much
confidence to be deterred.
d- Many of the results are initially discovered by an academic researchers who neglects the consequences because it is
not his job he has a script to follow. Or he cannot connect the dots because he is a nerd. Meyers uses Darwin as the
ultimate model: the independent gentleman scholar who does not need anyone and can follow a lead when he sees it.
e- It seems to me that discoverers are nonnerds.
Now it is depressing to see the works of the late Roy Porter, a man with remarkable curiosity and a refined intellect,
who wrote many charming books on the history of medicine. Does the narrative fallacy cancels everything he did? I
hope not. We urgently need to rewrite the history of medicine without the ex post explanations. Meyers started the
process: he provides data for modern medicine since, say, Pasteur. I am more interested in the genesis of the field before
the Galenic nerdification.

Financial Derivatives: Pricing, Applications, and Mathematics (5 stars)

One of the author, Baz, gave me a copy of this book when it came out and it went to sleep in my library as I was not in a
finance mood. I forgot about it until this week as I was stuck on a problem related to risk-neutral pricing and the
Girsanov theorem concerning changes in probability measure. I looked at every passage on the the subject until I hit on
it. Then I realized that I should have read it before: it is a condensed, but extremely deep , and complete exposition of
the subject of theoretical finance.

No financial book has the clarity of this text.

Other quant books do not have such notions as pricing kernel and economic theoretical matters. I would recommend
it as a necessary piece of the quant toolkit. Every quant should have it as a background tool as the usual quant
literature is standalone and devoid of these concepts.

Thinking and Deciding (5 stars)

People vote with their wallet particularly when they do it a second time, when they REpurchase. Those who believe in
the revelation of preferences should note that there are books one buys again when a copy is lost particularly when
they are read cover to cover.

I am buying another copy of this book as mine was lost or misplaced. That should speak volumes.
Critical Phenomena in Natural Sciences: Chaos, Fractals, Selforganization and Disorder: Concepts and Tools (Springer
Series in Synergetics) (5 stars)

As I am teaching the statistical mechanics part of a graduate class in mathematics,I was looking for a textbook on
complex systems & statistical physics with derivations, intuitions, and some physical examples. I did not realize that I
was looking too far Sornette, with hom I correspond regularly, is well known for his contributions and his prolific
output (actually some physicists make fun of the quantity of papers he writes). So his book did not come to mind. I once
stumbled on a problem with the derivation of preferential attachments;he recommended his book, which I took with a
grain a salt. After spending some time working the derivations on scalable laws, extreme value theory, renormalization
groups in this book, I elected to use it as my textbook. There is no equivalent. I have a dozen such yellow manuals; this
one is complete and ultimately clearest.

I do not know of a better textbook.

The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older (5 stars)

If you like the thinkers prose, the so-called romantic science,a style attributed to the Russian neuroscientist A. R.
Luria,which consists in publishing original research in literary form, you would love this book. Clearly intellectual
scientists are vanishing under the weight of the commoditization of the discipline. But once in a while someone emerges
to reverse such setbacks.

Goldberg, who was the great Lurias student and collaborator, is even more colorful and fun to read than the master. He
is egocentric, abrasive, opinionated, and colorful. He is also disdainful of the conventional beliefs in neurosciences for
instance he is suspicious of the assignment of specific functions, such as language, to anatomical regions. He is also
skeptical of the journalistic triune brain. His theory is that the hemispheric specialization is principally along pattern
matching and information processing lines:the left side stores patterns, while the right one processes novel tasks. It is
convincing to see that children suffer more from a right brain injury, while adults have the opposite effect.

There is a little bit of open plugging of Goldbergs for-profit institute;he would have gotten better results by being
subtle. A fre minor points. I did not understand why Goldberg discusses modularity, of which he is critical, as if it
were the same thing in both neurobiology and in cognitive science. In neurobiology, modularity implies regional
localization, while cognitive scientists (Marr, Fodor, etc.) make no such assumption: for them it is entirely functional
and they would be in great agreement with Goldberg. Also I did not understand why he attributes the language instinct
to Pinker, not Chomsky, and why he makes snide remarks about behavioral scientists like Kahneman and Tversky. But
these are very minor details that do not weaken the message (I still gave the book 5 stars). I am now spoiled; I need
more essays by opinionated, original,and intellectual, contemporary scientists.

The Sunday Philosophy Club : An Isabel Dalhousie Mystery (5 stars)

If your interests are limited to mystery books, nothing else, this book is not for you.

I initially bought this book because of the title, thinking that we would have a female version of Her Professor Dr Dr
(Hon.) Moritz-Maria von Igenfeld, the Pninish uberscholar philologist who wrote the seminal Portugese Irregular Verbs
(after which there was nothing left to discuss about the subject, Nothing.). I was curious to see how he would present
a female version of such scholar.

He did not. Nor was it a detective story, although there is an element of suspense. This book is about Applied Ethics, a
subject about which the author seems to know a bit. It also makes you feel like leading a quite thinking life in
Edinburgh.

I dont want to spoil the story but I felt that I was reading a detective story until I realized what it was

How Nature Works: The Science of Self-organized Criticality (5 stars)

This book is a great attempt at finding some universality based on systems in a critical state, with departures from
such state taking place in a manner that follows power laws. The sandpile is a great baby model for that.

Some people are critical of Baks approach, some even suggesting that we may not get power laws in these sandpile
effects, but something less scalable in the tails. The point is :so what? The man has vision.
I looked at the reviews of this book. Clearly a few narrow-minded scientists do not seem to like it (many did not like
Per Baks ego). But the book is remarkably intuitive and the presentation is so clear that he takes you by the hand. It is
even entertaining. If you are looking to find flaws in his argument his pedagogy allows it (it is immediately obvious to
us who dabble with simulations of these processes that you need an infinite sandpile to get a pure power law).

Another problem. I have been ordering the book on Amazon for ages. Copernicus books does not respond to emails. I
got my copy at the NYU library. Bak passed away 2 years ago and nobody seems to be pushing for his interest and that
of us his readers (for used books to sell for 99 implies some demand). This convinces me NEVER to publish with
Springer.

Social Cognition: Making Sense of People (5 stars)

I spent some time looking for a simple bedside aggregation of the various topics associated with the psychology of
decision making and the various perceptual biases, without finding much. Most of the books are excellent; but, aside
from this one (and Jon Barons) they are usually compilation of original research. I like to have a readable consolidation
of the material not far from my figertips. I was lucky to have found this book, which provides a wonderful and
comprehensive coverage of the topics.

It is limpid, precise, illustrative, showing a wonderful clarity of mind.

Now the bad news. The author passed away recently at the age of 48.

The (Mis)behavior of Markets (5 stars)

I have been involved in the professional practice of uncertainty for almost all of my adult life. Ive seen and read books
and papers on the subject of deviations, with this is interesting here and there. I closed this book feeling that it was the
first book in economics that spoke directly to me. Not only that, but this astonishing simplicity, realism, and relevance
of the subject makes it the only work in finance Ive read that seemed to make sense.

I cannot make justice to the book other than say 1) MAKES SENSE, 2) EASY TO UNDERSTAND, 3) PRESENT
SUCH EMPIRICAL VALIDY that it will make financial economists (charlatans) have to hide deeper from the common
man with their complicated mathematics.

Mandelbrot brought fractals into mathematics by going to the general public. He is doing the same here: pleading to the
regular man unburnded with knowledge of economics.

The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity (5 stars)

You are a hot shot in a company, though not the boss. You are paid extremely well, but, again you have plenty of bosses
above you (say the partners of an investment firm). Is it better than deriving a modest income being your own boss? The
counterintuive answer is NO. You will live longer in the second situation, even controlling for diet, lifestyle, and
genetic predispositions.

Marmot spent years poring over data; he left no stone unturned and is well read in the general literature on human
nature. This idea of people living longer when they exert control over their lives has not spread yet. That people lead
longer lives when they trust their neighbors and feel part of a community is far reaching. Just think of the implications
on social justice etc. Also think that everything you learn on human preferences and well-being in both economics and
medicine is either incomplete (medicine) or bogus (economics).

The book is well written, humorous at times, and rigorous it reads like a well-translated scientific paper. But it feels
that it is just the introduction to a topic. Please, write the continuation.

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (5 stars)

I find it clear in its exposition of the problems of modern psychology. In addition to the ideas of satisficing, it displays
the major ideas in the psychology of happiness (hedonic treadmill), along with the theories of choice & decision
making.
Clearly this is not for scholars as it is extremely diluted and slow at times; this is a popular science book. Still, I could
not put it down.

The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (5 stars)

I could not put it down. It hit me at some point that I was at the intersection of readability and scholarship. Clearly the
value of this book lies beyond its readability: Gottlieb is both a philosopher and a journalist (in the good sense), not a
journalist who writes about philosophy. He investigates and provides a fresh look at the material: For instance what we
bemoan as the flaws of Aristotelianism during the scholastic period came 2000 years after his work. Aristotle had an
empirical bent his followers are the ones to blame.

I liked his constant questioning of the labels put on philosophers and philosophies by the second hand readers.

Clearly he missed a few authors who deserve real coverage like Algazali, but I take what I can get.

The only other readable history of philosophy is Russells. This one was less hurriedly put together.

Someone should bug the author to hurry with the sequel on Locke, Hume, etc.

Intellectuals in the Middle Ages (5 stars)

Excellent, be it only for the presentation of the difference between the pompous scholastic thinker laboring in the
academy and the other nonacademic humanist laboring in the the luxe calme et volupte of his study.

Another of the attributes is the readability of the work Le Goff is a gifted writer.

Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition (5 stars)

I read the review of Simon Blackburn trashing the book: Eco made a few mistakes concerning the two dogmas of
empiricism (he confused Davidsons work with Quines first dogma). So I am sure many readers hesitated after a
review by such a rigorous big gun thinker as Blackburn.

When I started reading the book I was taken aback by the combination of depth and the vividness of the style. Eco is
sprightly and alive, something that cannot be said of many philosophers dealing with the subject of categories.

The notion of categories is not trivial: you need a simple conditional prior to identify an object; it is a simple
mathematical fact. You need to know what a table is to see it in the background separated from its surroundings. You
need to know what a face is so when it rotates you know it is still the same face. Computers have had a hard time with
such pattern recognition. A PRIOR category is a necessity. This was Kants intuition (the so-called rationalism). This
is also the field of semiotics as initially conceived. Eco took it to greater levels with his notion of what I would call in
scientific language a compression, a simplifation. This leads to the major problem we face today: what if the act of
compressing is arbitrary?

Not just very deep but it is a breath of fresh air to see such a philosophical discussion nondull, nondry, alive!

Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper (5 stars)

This is not a polularization /adult-education style presentation. Magee sees things form the inside; it is his own
formation of philosophical ideas & techniques that we witness.

Magee was close enough to Popper to present us with his ideas first-hand (nobody reads Popper; people read about
him). He also debunks a few idiotic myths about Wittgenstein as an atomist (Magee read W and realized that people
read commentary on him rarely the original).

Magee writes with the remarkable clarity of the English philosophers/thinkers.

Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (5 stars)

Philosophy has been under severe challenge from science, literally eating up its provinces: philosophy of mind went to
neuroscience; philosophy of language to Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science,etc. This book shows that there is
a need for someone to just specialize in the TRUTH, its scructure, its accessibility, its INVARIANCE.

Aside from the purely philosophical answers that scientists were grappling with, the book is like a manual for a new
regimen in philosophy. It reviews everything from epistemology to the logic of contingency, with insights here and
there about such topics as the observer biases (about computing probabilities when our existence has been linked to a
particular realization of the process).

I am not a philosopher but a probabilist; I found that this book just spoke to me. It certainly rid me of my prejudice
against modern philosophers.

A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness (5 stars)

Humphreys is the only person I know of who can work on nonhuman primates, write philosophy, and edit a literary
magazine.

The latter shows in this writing: I read this book in a single sitting. You may not agree with the ideas on consciousness
(I dont) but you get a clear exposition of all the work from Descartes to McGinn. Also if you want to figure out what
Dennett is saying it helps to read this book first.

Bull! : A History of the Boom, 1982-1999: What drove the Breakneck Marketand What Every Investor Needs to
Know About Financial Cycles (5 stars)

Maggie Mahar had the courage to take a look at what was behind all of this religious belief in markets. Clearly I do not
understand how she was able to work as a journalist when she has the attitude and mindset of a truth-seeker. I spent
some time looking at the difference between her book and Lowensteins: not even possible to start comparing. One
needs to be a trader to value her work.

Read this book now; wait a while then read it again.

I Think, Therefore I Laugh (5 stars)

I found this copy last week at Waterstone in London . It made me feel the plane ride was very short! I should have
bought a couple. This is a great book for a refresher in analytical philosophy: pleasant, clear. Great training for people
who tend to forget elementary relationships.

I did not know that JAP was a logician. Go buy this book!

The only competition is Think by Blackburn (rather boring).

The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy (4 stars)

This is a great book but I felt something cold inside of me while reading it. I dont know if it is cultural (the modern
English philosophers fear of displaying passion) but I had the feeling to talk to a plumber who developed expertise in
abstract concepts and their relationships just as if they were small plumbing problems fitting together under a
generalized plumbing theory. Perhaps philosophy needs to be treated like that, just like engineering but not for me. At
least I give myself the illusion of doing something moreliterary.

Colin McGINN teaches us that we need nevertheless to master the art of clarity of both thought and exposition. He
write with perfect clarity: a clear, unburdened, unaffected, UnFrench UnGerman philosophical prose.

The book has a presentation of the Kripke idea of naming as necessity of such clarity that I felt actually smart reading it.

Other than that there is the feeling of drabness in part of the book of the type I got once at a conference in an industrial
city West of London.

Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (4 stars)

I became interested in this book while reading a review panning it in The Nation by one Danny Postell (thanks to Arts
& Letters Daily). Clearly it was visible that John Gray was after a definition of humans that integrates our discoveries
from cognitive science, that we are just animals who are curse with intelligence, sufficient intelligence to figure out
things but insufficient to control our actions what I call the ability to rationalize (much of the difference between us
and other primates lies in our being considerably better than them at explaining our behavior). Postel (I have no clue
who he is and what kind of training he has in modern scientific thought but I am sure that he is sufficiently burdened
with a knowledge of humanities verbiage to get the book wrong); Postel was panning Gray exactly for the reasons that
would make this book insightful. So I BOUGHT THIS BOOK BECAUSE OF A BAD REVIEW!

What struck me with this book is that Gray converges in opinion to the discoveries of the New Science of Man without
quoting from neurobiology, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, the Kahneman-Tversky Heuristics & Biases
Tradition. It is remarkable that he identified the ills of the so-called humanist tradition without assistance from the
works on rationality posited by Kahneman and his peers.

This book is worth 4 stars because here we have a literary intellectual who manages to break through the mud in his
knowledge. It would have been worth 5 stars had Gray read a few more works in scientific thought beyond Darwin.
Anyway I am very impressed with a literary intellectual capable of this empirical and realistic view of man.

Mapping the Mind (5 stars)

I started my interest in neurobiology in December 1998 after reading a discussion by Rita Carter in the FT showing that
rational behavior under uncertainty and rational decision making can come from a defect in the amygdala. Since then
Ive had five years of reading more technical material (Gazzaniga et al is perhaps the most complete reference on
cognitive neuroscience) and thought that I transcended this book.

But it was not so. I picked up this book again last weekend and was both astonished at a) the ease of reading , b) the
clarity of the text and c) the breadth of the approach! I was looking for a refresher as I am trying to capture a general
idea of the functioning of that black box and found exactly what I needed without the excess burden of prominent
textbooks.

Very pedagogical.

I read here and there comments by neuroscientists dissing the book over small details perhaps invisible even to experts.
I just realize that Carter should keep updating it, as it is invaluable in my suitcase when I travel! I do not conceal my
suspicion of science writers and journalists more trained in communicating than understanding and usually shallow
babblers but Carter is an exception. Perhaps the science of the mind requires breadth of knowledge that she has. She is a
thinker in her own right not just a medical journalist.

The Mind Doesnt Work That Way (5 stars)

This critique of the computational theory of mind and the pan-adaptionist tradition is clearly so honest that it goes after
the ideas promoted by Fodors own 1983 watershed book The Modularity of Mind. In brief the essay is an attack on
massive modularity by saying that there are things after all that escape the programming (encapsulation and opacity are
key: how can we talk about something OPAQUE? We know nothing about a few critical things).

Granted the book is horribly written (that is Fodors charm after all) but his argumentation is so ferocious that he ends
up loud & clear.

The man is critical of his own ideas, and of the current in thought that he he helped create one may use Fodor-1 against
Fodor-2. Perhaps persons I hold in highest respect are those who go after their own ideas!

Bravo Fodor. Even if I do not agree I cant help admiring the man.

Consciousness: An Introduction (5 stars)

I am glad to find a complete book dealing with all aspects of consciousness in CLEARLY written format, with graphs
and tables to facilitate comprehension. The book covers everything I had seen before from Artificial Intelligence to
Philosophy to Neurology to Evolutionary Biology.
Say one wants to get an idea of Dan Dennetts theory of consciousness (without having to get through Dennetts
circuitous, unfocused and evasive prose) or Searles Chinese room argument or Turings test or Chalmers position or
Churchlands neurophilosophy or a presentation of research on the neural correlates of consciousnessEverything I
could think about is there.

Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts (5 stars)

I read the book once when it came out. Since then Ive had the chance to reread it a few times, discovering more and
more layers as my interests take me in new directions(for instance the discussion on the happiness treadmill goes to the
core of the current discussions in the economics of happiness). I now carry a copy on my trips as I can kill time in
airports by perusing random sections.

The book is so readable as to perhaps set a standard. Yet it is complete in the sense that it covers more of the
evolutionary thinking than meets the eye. I didnt realize it until I went to the site www.meangenes.org and got into the
more technical research material.
Reread it.

Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems (5 stars)

The author aside from the problem of crashes presents an insightful exposition of tipping points. I dont know why his
approach makes it clearer and deeper than those of Watts and Barabasi is it due to his using financial markets as a
base? or his being an expert at fat-tailed dynamics?

His work builds on the abyssus abyssum invocat (panic begets panics) and the dynamics of compounding
disequilibria. In addition the notion of CRITICAL POINT is made very clear.

Honestly I dont care for the idea of crashes; the same concepts can apply to sudden and unexpected euphorias.

I learned more from this book than any other on disequilibrium.

The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (5 stars)

Robert Shiller has the remarkable ability to think independently and the courage to propose ideas that to middlebrow
thinkers may sound speculative.

Think of what your reaction would have been had someone discussed risk sharing (insurance) before it became popular.
A lunacy people would have thought. Most risk management is like that: we think backwards with the benefit of past
history and find these ideas obvious. They were not at the time.

Throughout his career Shiller stood for unpopular ideas and was proven right (his 1981 paper on volatility, his 2000
discussion of the bubble). I would read and re-read this book.

Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (5 stars)

The book that carried the most influence on my thinking this year (I went back to it half a dozen times).
This is a clearly written presentation of our inability to forecast our own behavior and to predict our emotional reactions
to positive and negative events. One would think that the repetition of experiences with consistent forecasting biases
would lead to some correction but this is not the case.

We are more resilient than we think (immune neglect). The book also discusses the reversion to baseline happiness
after what we thought would bring a permanent improvement in our moods (yet we never learn from it).

The most important part covers the hindsight bias how we see past misfortunes as deterministic and how we can
confront negative emotions by making them even more so (by creating a narrative that make the events appear
unavoidable).

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (4 stars)

The book is a great exposition of modern scientific thinking and understanding of the nature of manbut it spends some
time on topics that are entirely obvious outside of the humanities academia. Indeed Pinker gives them too much respect
by honoring them with such a lengthy reply.

His other two books are much better.

No Bull: My Life In and Out of Markets (5 stars)

As a speculator I learned to take the best from books and ideas without arguments (many readers seem to be training to
be shallow critics)good insights are hard to come by. One does not find these in the writings of a journalist. There are
some things personal to the author that might be uninteresting to some, but I take the package. The man is one of the
greatest traders in history. There are a few jewels in there.

The man did it. Id rather listen to him than read better written but hollow prose from some journalist-writer.

The Statistical Mechanics of Financial Markets (5 stars)

Very useful book, particularly in what concerns alternative L-Stable distributions. True, not too versed in financial
theory but Id rather see the author erring on the side of more physics than mathematical economics. As an author I
dont ask much from books, just to deliver what they indend. This one does.

Clear historical description of Einstein/Bachelier. Hopefully one day we will call derivatives pricing the Bachelier
valuation.

The book in short provides an excellent perspective on the statistical approach to asset price dynamics. Very clear and
to the point.

Tartar Steppe (Verba Mundi) (5 stars)

I never understood why the book never made it in the Anglo-Saxon world. Il deserto is one of the 20th centurys
masterpieces.

A Guide to Econometrics 4th Edition (5 stars)

The best intuition builder in both statitics and econometrics. I have been reading the various editions throught my
career. Please, keep updating it, Peter Kennedy!